Operation Flashpoint is Better With Friends

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This four-player cooperative campaign has me excited.

By Anthony Gallegos

While I enjoy a wide variety of shooters, one aspect that's been woefully underrepresented is cooperative campaign play. Sure, we get the occasional game like Gears of War, or some games thrown in their take on Hoard mode, but I've yet to blast my way through a Call of Duty or Battlefield title with my pals.

It's a surprisingly good looking game.

The choice to include a cooperative campaign that supports up to four players might be the reason I end up playing Operation Flashpoint: Red River. Instead of throwing in a traditional competitive multiplayer that most people would likely ignore in favor of the better established brands, developer Codemasters just focused on making the campaign fun for friends. This alone will help them stand out in a year that's going to be crowded with shooters, and could be their ticket to success.

Red River is the follow up to Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. However, as I talked about the last time I checked it out, this is not the ultra-hardcore franchise from yesteryear. Instead, the team has really focused on balancing out the mechanics that the fans love (i.e. super easy deaths, bullet drop), with mechanics that make it more fun and appealing to newcomers (respawns, checkpoints, etc.). The result is an experience that's silly at times. For instance, I appreciate that I can now heal myself over and over if the need arises unlike the previous game's limited medical supplies, but I wish it didn't require me to go through two phases where I first stop the bleeding and then heal myself. It's more realistic this way, sure, but it's tough to figure out where to draw the line between realism and having a drawn out procedure that takes me away from the combat. The current set up is still just a little too tedious to please the more casual player like myself, and not likely not hardcore enough for the long-time fans.

Small moments like the above aside, though, I had a lot of fun playing through a mission cooperatively. I played the role of squad leader, enabling me to give orders to my team. While they certainly didn't have to listen to me, it still gave me the option to call out enemies for my team and point them in a certain direction if I felt the situation called for it. The host gets to play Squad Leader, and is capable of callingin artillery and airstrikes in certain missions, so I'm sure people will vie for who gets this position when playing cooperatively.

More importantly, it's engaging adjusting to the scenarios the campaign throws at you with real life players. In a Call of Duty campaign you are the hero, the sole reason the battle is being won, but in Red River's cooperative play I felt like we were all doing our part, watching one another's backs and working as a part of a well-armed unit. Even the more annoying parts like the healing mechanics I've discussed feel less tedious and more exciting when you know you have another human player there looking out for you.

Rolling with your friends is a lot of fun.

Operation Flashpoint: Red River isn't going to stand toe to toe with the big shooters this year, but it doesn't need to in order to be successful. It's obviously built on a much smaller budget than other shooters (the lack of animation when you get in and out of a car is a great example of a place where they cut corners), but in the time I've spent with it I've had fun. A cooperative campaign may not appeal to everyone, but for me it goes a long, long way towards keeping Red River on my radar.